Clem Cole writes:
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 7:58 AM, Doug McIlroy
<doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
This question bears on a recent thread about favorite flavors of Unix. My
favorite flavor is Universal Unix, namely the stuff that just works
everywhere. That's essentially what K&P is about.
+1 I would add, to me that's what the 'standardization' efforts were
really
about as a >>user<<. To settle on the minimum subset needed to the get the
job do and stop adding 'sugar' because you could. The ISVs wanted to maximize
(SPEC1170 et al), but to me 'Universal' was what do I really need/use every
day.
In fact, its why I switch from EMACS to vi early in my UNIX career. Vi and
(ed) were everywhere (K&P style). EMACS was not and if I found a flavor for
that system, it was always 'different.' I could sit down at anything from
MS-DOS to a Cray and stuff worked well enough that I could do what I needed to
do. [I'm not a great fan of "vim" for that reason either BTW -- I just
want
the basics to 'be there' and 'be reliable' - do what I want without
me having
to rethink].
I have a similar and maybe even more extreme position. When I was a manager
I placed restrictions on the tools and customizations for members of my team.
My goal was to make sure that any team member could go over to any other team
member's desk and get stuff done. I strongly pushed vi as an editor because
it was "standard"; as Clem said every emacs seemed to be different. I
prohibited
the redefinition of the vi key bindings and also any shell aliases that replaced
standard commands. Nothing worse for productivity than going to help out a
colleague and then discovering that they the redefined "ls" as "rm"!
Jon